{"id":238688,"date":"2025-11-02T00:22:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-02T00:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/238688\/"},"modified":"2025-11-02T00:22:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-02T00:22:11","slug":"musks-war-on-wikipedia-is-a-fight-for-a-future-without-f","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/238688\/","title":{"rendered":"Musk\u2019s war on Wikipedia is a fight for a future without f…"},"content":{"rendered":"

So Elon Musk has entered the knowledge business with Grokipedia\ufeff<\/a>, an AI-driven alternative to Wikipedia that he claims represents \ufeff\u201ca massive improvement\u201d\ufeff \u2013 indeed,\ufeff \u201ca necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the universe\u201d.\ufeff It is supposedly based on a fantasy of \ufeffDonald Trump\u2019s AI \ufeffand crypto \ufeffczar, David Sacks, \ufeffwho believes\ufeff that Wikipedia is\ufeff \u201chopelessly biased\u201d because an \u201carmy of left\ufeffwing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections\u201d. \ufeffThe problem is compounded, he thinks, by the fact that \ufeff\u201cWikipedia often appears in Google search results, and now it\u2019s a trusted source for AI model training\u201d.\ufeff<\/p>\n

Turns out that Sacks was late to the anti-Wikipedia party. Musk has been on the warpath about it since at least 2023, when, in a chat\ufeff with his buddy Benjamin Netanyahu, he said: \ufeff\u201cThere\u2019s an old saying that \u2018history is written by the victors\ufeff\u2019 \u2013 it\u2019s like, well, not if your enemies are still alive and have a lot of time on their hands to edit Wikipedia<\/a>. The losers just got a lot of time on their hands.\ufeff\u201d \ufeffYes, agreed Bibi: \u201cHistory is written by those who can harness the most editors.\u201d\ufeff By 2024, Musk was urging users to \u201cstop donating to Wokepedia [sic] until they restore balance to their editing authority\u201d.<\/p>\n

Grokipedia\u2019s debut proved inauspicious. According to the Washington Post, it remained publicly accessible for barely an hour before blocking visitors. \u201cThe site,\u201d \ufeffsaid the Post, \u201cresembled Wikipedia in style and format\u2026 but was \ufeffmore right-leaning in how it framed some articles.\u201d<\/p>\n

Take gender, for instance, which, according to Grokipedia,\ufeff \u201crefers to the binary classification of humans as male or female based on biological sex\u2026\ufeff\u201d Wikipedia\u2019s entry starts with: \u201cGender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioural aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender.\u201d This is merely one indicator, but it signals clearly which side of the culture wars Musk\u2019s oracle favours. Whether it represents an improvement\ufeff over its rival remains to be seen.<\/p>\n

One thing is interesting, though. In addition to his usual braggadocio, Musk has been approvingly tweeting criticisms of Wikipedia by Larry Sanger \ufeff, the g\ufeffuy who co-founded the encyclopedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001.\ufeff Sanger, like a cut-price Martin Luther, has set out his critique in the form of \u201cNine Theses\u201d\ufeff nailed to Wikipedia\u2019s virtual door. These state that Wikipedia should end decision-making by \u201cconsensus\u201d, enable competing articles, abolish source blacklists, revive its original neutrality policy, repeal its founding mantra to \u201cignore all rules\u201d, reveal who its leaders are, let the public rate articles, end permanent blocking of some users and \u201cadopt a legislative process\u201d.<\/p>\n

To this user \u2013 and supporter \u2013 of Wikipedia, a few of these proposals make sense. The encyclopedia has become one of the world\u2019s most influential media platforms, with a $\ufeff144\ufeffm endowment as of 2024, when it also had an income of $185m\ufeff. It\u2019s the \ufeffninth most-visited website\ufeff in the world and it dominates search results for information queries. So it\u2019s a powerful institution and it therefore seems appropriate that the names of the 60-odd people who play significant roles in it should be in the public domain. Likewise, allowing readers to \u201crate\u201d articles seems reasonable, not least because it would provide a feedback mechanism that may be editorially useful. Rethinking the neutrality policy is also both timely and fraught, given our polarised media ecosystem. The original policy was that \u201cwe should fairly represent all sides of a dispute, and not make an article state, imply, or insinuate that any one side is correct\u201d. Critics such as Sanger argue that the encyclopedia has gradually shifted from representing all published viewpoints equally to marginalising dissenting views that rely on sources the editorial community deems \u201cunreliable\u201d.<\/p>\n

But two of Sanger\u2019s \u201ctheses\u201d are seriously misguided. These are the proposals that Wikipedia should publish competing articles and that decision-making by \u201cconsensus\u201d should be abandoned. Adopting these would tear the heart out of one of the most remarkable institutions that digital technology has enabled. Publishing rival articles on the same topic would fragment Wikipedia\u2019s core value proposition: a single, synthesised summary of human knowledge. And deciding on what\u2019s most likely to be true on the basis of a show of hands is not the wisest way to reach a conclusion.<\/p>\n

Adopting these two theses would launch Wikipedia on to the slippery slope down into the \u201cchoose your own reality\u201d nightmare that now characterises the public spheres of democracies everywhere. And leave us with an inscrutable AI-powered alternative attentive only to its owner\u2019s curious views about truth.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, though, Wikipedia already has a pretty good entry \ufeffabout Grokipedia<\/a>. Which is just what \ufeffyou would expect.\ufeff<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m reading<\/p>\n

Is there anybody there, ChatGPT?<\/p>\n

An extraordinary blogpost \ufeffby Nicholas Carr is The<\/a> Medium<\/a> Is the Medium<\/a>, which starts with WB Yeats marrying an English spiritualist and ends with AI.<\/p>\n

Leif Weatherby\u2019s Our Spreadsheet Overlords<\/a> is a long and insightful essay on how AI is reinforcing our cultural dependence on Excel et al.<\/p>\n

Photo: Jonathan Raa\/NurPhoto\/Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So Elon Musk has entered the knowledge business with Grokipedia\ufeff, an AI-driven alternative to Wikipedia that he claims…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":238689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-238688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}